Individual Author Record

General Information

Name: Bruce Davidson

Illinois Connection

He was born in Chicago, Illinois.

Biographical and Professional Information

Bruce Davidson is an award-winning photographer. He is best known for his depictions of poverty and adversity in American life. He has been a contributor to periodicals, including, ''Life'', ''Realites'', ''Du'', ''Esquire'', ''Queen'', ''Look'' and ''Vogue''. Davidson's photographs are held in museums around the world. He has published several books and received many awards, including the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts to document one block in Spanish Harlem. Two one-man exhibitions of his work have been shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Davidson has also dreicted short films, including, ''Living off the Land and Isaac Singer's Nightmare'' and ''Mrs. Pupko's Beard''.

Selected Titles At Your Library

Photographs of Central Park that reveal a humane haven of breathtaking beauty as well as a site for wonderous adventures. Renowned as an intrepid explorer of the urban terrain, Bruce Davidson has challenged himself in a remarkable new way, taking on the visual and metaphorical scope of Central Park. -- Publisher description.

In 1980 Bruce Davidson began photographing the New York subway system, venturing regularly into this intoxicating, sometimes dangerous subterranean world. At first Davidson photographed in black and white, but he soon realized color was necessary to depict the intensity of this graffiti-covered landscape. Originally published in 1986, this updated Steidl edition of Subway is printed from new scans of Davidsons Kodachrome slides and features additional images.

Heroes, idols, and enemies revealed as never before. What happens when a photographer known for his empathetic portraiture of the marginalized or downtrodden suddenly focuses his extraordinary eye on the lifestyles of the rich and the famous? In Bruce Davidson's wildly diverse and typically revealing Personalities witness an aggressive Joan Crawford, apparently hell-bent on force-feeding some poor soul the unwavering intensity of Samuel Beckett during a rehearsal of Waiting for Godot and Diana Ross and the Supremes in the midst of a snowball fight or relaxing backstage at the Apollo. Seen through Davidson's lens, Newt Gingrich looks as goofy as Bobby Kennedy seems impenetrable. From his portraits of East One Hundredth Street in Harlem, to subway riders in Subway, or the denizens of Central Park in his most recent, widely acclaimed Aperture Book, Central Park, Davidson has always established an intuitive rapport with his subjects. Now, for the first time, we see him take on some of our favorite and most controversial personalities.

"In 1960, after spending an intense year photographing a notorious Brooklyn street gang called "The Jokers", Bruce Davidson decided that he needed to get away from the tension, depression, and potential violence connected to that work. He took on a commission to photograph Marilyn Monroe during the making of John Houston's film The Misfits in the Nevada desert, and then traveled to London on a commission for The Queen magazine. Edited by Jocelyn Stevens, The Queen was a magazine devoted to.